Best Rock Festival (2010)

All Tomorrow's Parties

Though we are quite partial to our own Siren Festival on Coney Island and its ebullient combination of rock bands, corn dogs, and gleefully drunken ocean-bobbing, it's still the sordid little sister to All Tomorrow's Parties, the ultimate example of glorious rock-and-roll surrealism. Held at Kutsher's Country Club in Monticello, New York (the same Catskills camp that hosted some other gyratin' fools in Dirty Dancing), the three-day festival is an intimate occasion of a few thousand fans and a proudly esoteric mix; this September, guest curator Jim Jarmusch skewed happily toward noise, and the resulting lineup of Iggy and the Stooges, Sunn O))), Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, and Sleep was truly once-in-a-lifetime. ATP is the ultimate summer camp for the deranged, and musicians and fans roam the grounds and interact in various untoward ways. It is epic, and then some.